Add to your list the requirement that university receiving federal grants have to keep their administrative and non-academic expenses to 25% max. Otherwise these grants fund more administrative positions and other needless fluff. US universities have increased spending on administrative and non-academic (mainly college athletics) positions by 300% while expenses for academic positions (profs, researchers, techs) stayed flat at best.
Yes, but a responsible Congress with folks who have a clue increase R&D and infrastructure spending during a regression. Not only does that keep folks employed, it also lays the groundwork once the economy picks back up again. And that is when Congress needs to step in and grab some of that cash so that it compensates for previous expenses rather than make very few people very rich. But with that many utterly clueless tea baggers in Congress we can all forget about common sense.
The Gates Foundation favors research teams over others stifling the necessary discourse. Also, so far none of the projects sponsored by the Gates Foundation had any lasting impact for the greater good. Plus...although he is no longer directly involved...Microsoft is one of the biggest roadblocks to open access to tech.
I remember when the music industry went all berserk on Napster with the goal to kill once and for all any technology usable for streaming and sharing files on line. Some eventually came to their senses and saw this as an opportunity...interestingly, it was tech giants like Apple and Google, not the record companies.
Yep! And before rfing anything make yet another backup locally, even if it on low tier consumer grade storage. Plus, no matter what it is, never run a command on all servers. Easy to say now, but I bet we all got burned by our own sloppy work. And those who have not, now is the time to craft check lists and start using them.
I work in QA and I wish someone, just anyone, would bother to stop by and ask "Did you test this?" If I did then I can show exactly what I tested, how I tested it, when I tested it, and what the test result was. Even if my answer is "No, I did not test this because that case did not come to mind." I'd be glad, because now I can add this test case to my test plan and make sure that this issue does not come up again.
Sadly, QA is a line item for many companies that they want to check off on some list, but really don't give a damn what QA does or finds. Bug reports are seen as annoying, petty, hairsplitting noise that some QA underlying only reported to throw a wrench into the release gears. Software businesses are businesses that want to sell as much stuff as quickly as possible. They tend not to care about quality until customers en masse call them out on it. Then out of a sudden the finger pointing and blame game starts with again QA holding the short end of the stick. For that reason I use predominantly email and want any decision in writing and I keep everything. Also, I do not close any bug report that is security related unless a fix was put in place. Others can put their name on it, but I won't answer in court why I accepted the wontfix decision.
I also blame customers to some extent. I work on software that sold thousands of copies and so far only one customer asked for test plans and test results as part of the contract. I am really surprised that so many pay a lot of money and do not request any records that show what the test scope and results were.
Good idea, but the main purpose in my opinion is to prevent the user from having to call someone else for help. Tell the user right then and there what the code expected and what it got and what the most likely means are to circumvent the issue. The dev went through the trouble to catch the error and process it, might as well make it more useful.
Companies still want users to call support for help, but for the right reasons. To take the example, "ERR 34: Bad srvc" is not a good reason because it probably does not tell the support rep anything either. Which service? What makes it bad? What does "34" mean?
As you may have not known, the content is provided by various folks who submit probably a substantial number of stories to/. on a daily basis. I assume there are half a dozen folks sitting somewhere moderating submissions for content, but not necessarily accuracy. For that the mods would need to do the same job that the authors do.
If you hate/. that much, why hang out here? If you want/. to be better, submit your own articles. Geez...here you get a fairly freely accessible service that others put together for you to consume at will and you start bitching about it? Kids these days.....
In all fairness, I haven't seen a single OS or app so far that provides useful error messages. An error message has to include
- what went wrong in general terms that mean something (e.g. the much dreaded "object reference not set to an instance of an object" error does not even mean anything to developers)
- what the code expected and what it got instead
- how to fix this problem
- how to get more help for especially this issue
Generic error handling pages are useless, as are hundreds of lines in logs and memory dumps unless there is a means to submit those and get a fairly instant reply from a person or system with further advice.
I work in software development for over 20 years now and it is already insanely difficult to get bugs fixed. Asking product managers to allow developers to work on methods for better error messages is a futile request. Unless there are hard numbers attached to it that will show a better ROI than cramming in more buggy features that make sales...and delayed headaches.
This is what happens when you hire tech evangelists (they know someone who knows someone who got them the job), marketing leaders (blahblaher with a fancy beard), customer relations managers (you have relations, you do not manage them!) rather than smart QA folks who have veto powers.
Not everyone has the luxury of broadband access. You'd be surprised how many in the US have either dialup, crappy overpriced cell service, or no Internet access as option. For all those folks getting a DVD in the mail is the only reasonable means of watching movies.
And replace Flash with what? There is no capable replacement. You may point to HTML5, CSS, and JS, but with each browser executing and rendering the same code differently or not at all the user experience is never the same. As soon as browsers render content not only exactly the same on all OS, but also fully compliant with W3C standards, then we may be able to ditch Flash, although Flash can do more than the hodgepodge of three markup/script languages.
The same people who voted these idiots into state legislature also vote for the judges....so, I have my doubts in some cases, not that a judge could not tell the difference, more than in their radical conservative pseudoreligious views they do not want to see a difference, especially with law on their side.
Will everyone of the proponents of such pseudo-religious freedom laws ask their customers about their sexual orientation just to make sure that they do not accidentally serve a gay person?
That is your point of view, but many other users clearly prefer a GUI to do everything on their systems. An alphabet with just a few dozen characters is as limiting, even worse when using commands that do not share a common means of passing parameters and requiring at times a lot of them.
Yes, but many of the Linux folks sell Linux as an OS that runs on any old hardware without issues. When many suggest this then do not get upset when users expect it to do exactly that.
See my post above, on my laptop a 4 year old distro works fine, but a 4 month old of the same flavor does not. What the heck is up with that? It is not that the hardware I use is crap, it is that during the course of time something changed that caused the OS to break. I gave up on asking people about this issue because they shrug shoulders as well as I can.
Quality equates to ease of use and interoperability. A few weeks back I had a Mint Linux system and attempted to share out a folder to be used by Windows systems as a file share. After reading up and grabbing what was recommended as a GUI tool to Samba I was still left with editing config files in places I never knew existed and in the end failing miserably. One Windows box managed to see the share, several others did not, none of them could read or write to the share despite providing proper credentials.
Of course, that is not a Linux (kernel) problem nor has it anything to do with window managers (desktop), but it is one example where a very bare bones simple task takes hours to accomplish and in the end just doesn't work. I am sure there are ways to fix this, but do I have the time to wade through pages and pages of often badly written documentation that refers to config file entries that are not found on my system? In case you wonder, the answer is "No!".
Likewise, trying to hook up that system to my Brother network printer was a real pain in the you know where. That in the end worked as long as I waited for about a minute to have the print spooler send the data over for a single page with some text on it.
Also, I have an old laptop that is still fully functional. Sad thing is, I have to rely on distros from Jurrassic Park that are no longer maintained. So I am stuck with outdated and buggy components. Any attempt to update causes the laptop to no longer boot spitting out useless error messages. In all fairness, Win 8.1 also failed to boot, but Win 7 still works.
It is dumb stuff like this that causes Linux based distros to be dismissed, because when it comes to hardware support and interoperability Linux is not much better in many cases than Windows (in other cases it is indeed by far better). Both OS families also fail miserably when things go wrong. Except for a select few nobody knows what might cause a kernel panic or why page operation 000000000234 failed or why some cryptic process was terminated unexpectedly.
As soon as Torvalds and Co can push out a decent distro that runs on my old laptop so that I do not have to throw away a perfectly fine piece of hardware and bother with making error messages useful we have a real winner here.
Security analysts ought to read this, but you may still want to provide your perspective. A lot of security issues are caused by incorrect information and plain FUD. I think it is important for security analysts to know about this and be well informed about the content and sources rather than outright ignore it. If I'd ask a security analyst about this issue and she/he tells me that they have no idea what I'm talking about (because they followed some advice to not bother with reading about it) I reasonably question their credentials. As far as security goes, ignorance is not bliss, it is one of the core problems.
The big hype around smart watches got us ridiculously expensive gadgets that are not smart without a smart phone which by itself is shockingly dumb without a decent data plan that allows asking servers permanently for what to do. And what do these overpriced gizmos do? Tell time, measure heart beat, and show a notice that you need to pull your phone out of your pocket.
Yea, it is great for bragging, like owning a yacht or a souped up Mercedes that shares the garage with a Tesla and a Porsche, but so far there is little to no practical use that would turn a smart watch to have a positive ROI. That makes the difference between a tool and a toy even in consumer space.
It all depends. In a casually typed email from friends or family I do not bother pointing out any errors. I do so in published articles, books, and for comments in which people claim others are so stupid. Especially news outlets need to have their staff read and edit anything before publishing. Yesterday I came across an article where the author was writing about "censors" when it should have been "sensors". Language is their tool of the trade and showing the lack of mastering language makes one wonder how much care they put into finding reliable sources. It is like a bank having obvious calculation errors in their annual financial statement. I wouldn't trust that bank with a single penny.
To be fair, spelling and pronunciation in the English language often make no sense. I will never understand why recipe does not rhyme with pipe, or why people think that "alot" is a word. Then again, for the latter there is spell check. Use it!
I always wonder who determines when a person is obese or not. Is it a definition cooked up by health and life insurances? Or is there any substantial scientific research done? I wonder because both my grandparents would have easily fit into the obese category and they lived to be 96 and 98, respectively.
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Add to your list the requirement that university receiving federal grants have to keep their administrative and non-academic expenses to 25% max. Otherwise these grants fund more administrative positions and other needless fluff. US universities have increased spending on administrative and non-academic (mainly college athletics) positions by 300% while expenses for academic positions (profs, researchers, techs) stayed flat at best.
Yes, but a responsible Congress with folks who have a clue increase R&D and infrastructure spending during a regression. Not only does that keep folks employed, it also lays the groundwork once the economy picks back up again. And that is when Congress needs to step in and grab some of that cash so that it compensates for previous expenses rather than make very few people very rich. But with that many utterly clueless tea baggers in Congress we can all forget about common sense.
The Gates Foundation favors research teams over others stifling the necessary discourse. Also, so far none of the projects sponsored by the Gates Foundation had any lasting impact for the greater good. Plus...although he is no longer directly involved...Microsoft is one of the biggest roadblocks to open access to tech.
I remember when the music industry went all berserk on Napster with the goal to kill once and for all any technology usable for streaming and sharing files on line. Some eventually came to their senses and saw this as an opportunity...interestingly, it was tech giants like Apple and Google, not the record companies.
Yep! And before rfing anything make yet another backup locally, even if it on low tier consumer grade storage. Plus, no matter what it is, never run a command on all servers. Easy to say now, but I bet we all got burned by our own sloppy work. And those who have not, now is the time to craft check lists and start using them.
Also several significant changes how Chrome operates with web APIs. That broke a lot of stuff that now has to get fixed, thanks Google!
AWESOME! I will make sure we credit squiggleslash when we implement this.
I work in QA and I wish someone, just anyone, would bother to stop by and ask "Did you test this?" If I did then I can show exactly what I tested, how I tested it, when I tested it, and what the test result was. Even if my answer is "No, I did not test this because that case did not come to mind." I'd be glad, because now I can add this test case to my test plan and make sure that this issue does not come up again. Sadly, QA is a line item for many companies that they want to check off on some list, but really don't give a damn what QA does or finds. Bug reports are seen as annoying, petty, hairsplitting noise that some QA underlying only reported to throw a wrench into the release gears. Software businesses are businesses that want to sell as much stuff as quickly as possible. They tend not to care about quality until customers en masse call them out on it. Then out of a sudden the finger pointing and blame game starts with again QA holding the short end of the stick. For that reason I use predominantly email and want any decision in writing and I keep everything. Also, I do not close any bug report that is security related unless a fix was put in place. Others can put their name on it, but I won't answer in court why I accepted the wontfix decision. I also blame customers to some extent. I work on software that sold thousands of copies and so far only one customer asked for test plans and test results as part of the contract. I am really surprised that so many pay a lot of money and do not request any records that show what the test scope and results were.
Good idea, but the main purpose in my opinion is to prevent the user from having to call someone else for help. Tell the user right then and there what the code expected and what it got and what the most likely means are to circumvent the issue. The dev went through the trouble to catch the error and process it, might as well make it more useful. Companies still want users to call support for help, but for the right reasons. To take the example, "ERR 34: Bad srvc" is not a good reason because it probably does not tell the support rep anything either. Which service? What makes it bad? What does "34" mean?
As you may have not known, the content is provided by various folks who submit probably a substantial number of stories to /. on a daily basis. I assume there are half a dozen folks sitting somewhere moderating submissions for content, but not necessarily accuracy. For that the mods would need to do the same job that the authors do.
If you hate /. that much, why hang out here? If you want /. to be better, submit your own articles. Geez...here you get a fairly freely accessible service that others put together for you to consume at will and you start bitching about it? Kids these days.....
In all fairness, I haven't seen a single OS or app so far that provides useful error messages. An error message has to include - what went wrong in general terms that mean something (e.g. the much dreaded "object reference not set to an instance of an object" error does not even mean anything to developers) - what the code expected and what it got instead - how to fix this problem - how to get more help for especially this issue Generic error handling pages are useless, as are hundreds of lines in logs and memory dumps unless there is a means to submit those and get a fairly instant reply from a person or system with further advice. I work in software development for over 20 years now and it is already insanely difficult to get bugs fixed. Asking product managers to allow developers to work on methods for better error messages is a futile request. Unless there are hard numbers attached to it that will show a better ROI than cramming in more buggy features that make sales...and delayed headaches.
This is what happens when you hire tech evangelists (they know someone who knows someone who got them the job), marketing leaders (blahblaher with a fancy beard), customer relations managers (you have relations, you do not manage them!) rather than smart QA folks who have veto powers.
Not everyone has the luxury of broadband access. You'd be surprised how many in the US have either dialup, crappy overpriced cell service, or no Internet access as option. For all those folks getting a DVD in the mail is the only reasonable means of watching movies.
And replace Flash with what? There is no capable replacement. You may point to HTML5, CSS, and JS, but with each browser executing and rendering the same code differently or not at all the user experience is never the same. As soon as browsers render content not only exactly the same on all OS, but also fully compliant with W3C standards, then we may be able to ditch Flash, although Flash can do more than the hodgepodge of three markup/script languages.
So Edge will stop playing all these annoying Flash ads? I have to see it to believe it.
The same people who voted these idiots into state legislature also vote for the judges....so, I have my doubts in some cases, not that a judge could not tell the difference, more than in their radical conservative pseudoreligious views they do not want to see a difference, especially with law on their side.
Will everyone of the proponents of such pseudo-religious freedom laws ask their customers about their sexual orientation just to make sure that they do not accidentally serve a gay person?
That is your point of view, but many other users clearly prefer a GUI to do everything on their systems. An alphabet with just a few dozen characters is as limiting, even worse when using commands that do not share a common means of passing parameters and requiring at times a lot of them.
Yes, but many of the Linux folks sell Linux as an OS that runs on any old hardware without issues. When many suggest this then do not get upset when users expect it to do exactly that. See my post above, on my laptop a 4 year old distro works fine, but a 4 month old of the same flavor does not. What the heck is up with that? It is not that the hardware I use is crap, it is that during the course of time something changed that caused the OS to break. I gave up on asking people about this issue because they shrug shoulders as well as I can.
Quality equates to ease of use and interoperability. A few weeks back I had a Mint Linux system and attempted to share out a folder to be used by Windows systems as a file share. After reading up and grabbing what was recommended as a GUI tool to Samba I was still left with editing config files in places I never knew existed and in the end failing miserably. One Windows box managed to see the share, several others did not, none of them could read or write to the share despite providing proper credentials. Of course, that is not a Linux (kernel) problem nor has it anything to do with window managers (desktop), but it is one example where a very bare bones simple task takes hours to accomplish and in the end just doesn't work. I am sure there are ways to fix this, but do I have the time to wade through pages and pages of often badly written documentation that refers to config file entries that are not found on my system? In case you wonder, the answer is "No!". Likewise, trying to hook up that system to my Brother network printer was a real pain in the you know where. That in the end worked as long as I waited for about a minute to have the print spooler send the data over for a single page with some text on it. Also, I have an old laptop that is still fully functional. Sad thing is, I have to rely on distros from Jurrassic Park that are no longer maintained. So I am stuck with outdated and buggy components. Any attempt to update causes the laptop to no longer boot spitting out useless error messages. In all fairness, Win 8.1 also failed to boot, but Win 7 still works. It is dumb stuff like this that causes Linux based distros to be dismissed, because when it comes to hardware support and interoperability Linux is not much better in many cases than Windows (in other cases it is indeed by far better). Both OS families also fail miserably when things go wrong. Except for a select few nobody knows what might cause a kernel panic or why page operation 000000000234 failed or why some cryptic process was terminated unexpectedly. As soon as Torvalds and Co can push out a decent distro that runs on my old laptop so that I do not have to throw away a perfectly fine piece of hardware and bother with making error messages useful we have a real winner here.
Security analysts ought to read this, but you may still want to provide your perspective. A lot of security issues are caused by incorrect information and plain FUD. I think it is important for security analysts to know about this and be well informed about the content and sources rather than outright ignore it. If I'd ask a security analyst about this issue and she/he tells me that they have no idea what I'm talking about (because they followed some advice to not bother with reading about it) I reasonably question their credentials. As far as security goes, ignorance is not bliss, it is one of the core problems.
So maybe it was a good idea after all that Clinton ran her own email server? That one did not get hacked as far as we know.
The big hype around smart watches got us ridiculously expensive gadgets that are not smart without a smart phone which by itself is shockingly dumb without a decent data plan that allows asking servers permanently for what to do. And what do these overpriced gizmos do? Tell time, measure heart beat, and show a notice that you need to pull your phone out of your pocket. Yea, it is great for bragging, like owning a yacht or a souped up Mercedes that shares the garage with a Tesla and a Porsche, but so far there is little to no practical use that would turn a smart watch to have a positive ROI. That makes the difference between a tool and a toy even in consumer space.
It all depends. In a casually typed email from friends or family I do not bother pointing out any errors. I do so in published articles, books, and for comments in which people claim others are so stupid. Especially news outlets need to have their staff read and edit anything before publishing. Yesterday I came across an article where the author was writing about "censors" when it should have been "sensors". Language is their tool of the trade and showing the lack of mastering language makes one wonder how much care they put into finding reliable sources. It is like a bank having obvious calculation errors in their annual financial statement. I wouldn't trust that bank with a single penny. To be fair, spelling and pronunciation in the English language often make no sense. I will never understand why recipe does not rhyme with pipe, or why people think that "alot" is a word. Then again, for the latter there is spell check. Use it!
I always wonder who determines when a person is obese or not. Is it a definition cooked up by health and life insurances? Or is there any substantial scientific research done? I wonder because both my grandparents would have easily fit into the obese category and they lived to be 96 and 98, respectively.